Sunday, May 11, 2008

Someone once pointed out to me that most white people have no racist thought whatsoever... until a black person does better than them at something. In my experience, at that point, a certain percentage of them become conspiracy theorists. Well, she cheated! The system was rigged! He had an unfairadvantage! She played too rough! And so forth.(Sigh) It's still sad to watch it, eh?...

5 comments:

I realize this might be some kind of radical objectivism or something, but I always kind of assumed that if someone did better than me at something, it's because they're better than me at something. And, to further the objectivism... cheating is one way of being better at things. But I'll be buggered if I can figure out what the hell race has to do with that.

Ah, I knew I wasn't clear here. I'm not saying that black people never cheat, or that, if a white person thinks that a black guy cheated, they're racist. What I would say is that, in my experience, there are a handful of white people who are completely unwilling to consider the possibility that maybe the black person just did objectively better at something. What I would see is the home team loses to the team from the "black school" and the parents and players gripe that the referees were idiots, or the black kids played too rough, or they cheated. But a lot of those parents just wouldn't accept the possibility that, hey, maybe they were just a better team. I've seen the same thing happen when the black employee gets promoted. Again, I wouldn't say it's racist to consider that the system might be rigged somehow. But, I would say it's perhaps indicative of a certain racist mindset to be totally unable to accept the possibility that maybe the black guy was just better.

In other words, I'd say that radical objectivism would be the opposite of this mentality.

I see this with Team Clinton and a number of their supporters. I've heard Hillary people say that Obama campaigned unfairly, or that the media was rigged, or that the blacks stick together, or that he was too rough; I've even been told that he rigged the election machines! What I would say is that a number of those people seem completely unable to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he was just an objectively better candidate and a majority of people saw that.

I'll give another example. I've read in a number of US papers now that the fact that Obama won over 90% of the black vote means that Americans really do vote along racial lines.

Well, no, not necessarily. It's entirely possible that black voters saw Obama as an objectively better candidate and that, for them, his skin color wasn't an issue, while for whites maybe it was. It's also amazing that Clinton went from having a 30% advantage among African-American voters to only being able to capture 7% of their vote. So, it's also possible that she did something wrong along the way that upset blacks more than it did whites.

But for me, I really don't think I care about race or gender one way or the other. I just prefer Obama because he doesn't talk about nuking sovereign nations as a first resort or giving people free money to forget about gas prices.

Correction: Ah, I just read the context to that comment she makde about nuking Iran. Apparently, they asked Clinton how the US would respond *if Iran launched nukes at Israel*, and she said "we would completely obliterate them". So, it was only a first resort in the case of nukes, and some people think she was just pandering to the voters. I have no idea when we reached the point that calling for genocide was pandering to the voters. But, there you go.